


Jewel in a Tin Box

by CampionSayn



Category: The Last Unicorn (1982)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Older Woman/Younger Man, after-canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-17
Updated: 2014-03-17
Packaged: 2018-01-16 03:00:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1329346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CampionSayn/pseuds/CampionSayn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It cannot be expected that Lir would live out his days alone as a new king. It stands to reason, however also, that Amalthea would not be the one there for him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Jewel in a Tin Box

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Twilight_Shadow_Songs](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Twilight_Shadow_Songs/gifts).



_-:- Not that looks are important. You don’t look at the mantelpiece when you poke the fire. -The Entertainer._

* * *

 

_Winter_ -:-   
  
The warmth of the heated water in the sink that had gone dark grey after an hour of cleaning the plates from breakfast _(small event that it was, even when King Haggard ordered Schmendrick to entertain them by trying to turn three of the hard boiled eggs into something elegant—the two brown shelled eggs deciding to give him a hard time by sprouting four legs each; spiderlike and sturdy and **fast** when they ran off the table and got chased by the cat until they accidentally found a window and leapt out into the tossing waves outside where they broke apart and went back to their inanimate forms. The white egg with the little black speckles shaped in Schmendrick’s hands into a white silk handkerchief perfect and clean until the magician bowed and made to hand it to the king and it drew too close to the candle that was shocked awake and hot by Schmendrick’s movement and burnt the silk into charred nothingness) _ was soaked into Molly’s hands and she sighed in minor contentment as the last of the dishes were placed on the drying wrack.  
  
Now all she had to do was clean the staircase in the southern wing of the castle where the halls shook the hardest when the Red Bull went out in the evenings looking for something carefully hidden in a different form. Every time that wing shook, pieces of the ceiling fell to the floor and dust picked its way around every which way to make it so that when Molly or the Lady Amalthea stepped around the marble flooring, pieces clung to their feet and they left little footprints where Molly had already cleaned _(Molly more often than her Lady, but still)_ and would have to go over again until her knees hurt from being pressed to the cold floor and her shoulders ached from moving her upper body back and forth, leaning into the occasional cracks in the floor that made the work all the harder. It wasn’t glamorous, but it gave her the opportunity to look around the castle for signs of the other unicorns without drawing attention from the king.   
  
Soft, worn leather shoes brushed the ground in the kitchen entry, so unlike Molly’s feet, with such grace and care that she didn’t hear it and when she turned around and found Lir little more than a step away from her, she braced herself like any person would, hands taking place at her sides and swaying back a little for balance and her feet planted with a little forward motion.   
  
  
The stool she regularly sat on to peel potatoes and such was directly next to where her left big toe touched down and the resounding clatter from said toe hitting it made even Lir flinch, though Molly didn’t notice as she let out a rather unladylike hiss of air and then curse, hopping up and down on the undamaged foot and grasping the other with rough calloused hands.  
  
“Shit! Oh, shit, shit, fuck, ow, shit…”   
  
“My apologies, Molly!” Lir begged pardon, lending her a hand and steering her over to a chair around the side of the table, being gentle when he set her down and trying not to take offense like any other prince would when he tried to move his hands to still her foot in his palm to have a look and she swatted his fingers, his palms, himself, away to rub at the digit herself, still hissing obscenities though at a lower decibel, “I didn’t mean to startle you.”  
  
“I-It’s fine, highness. Just an accident,” Molly answered back, not looking at the young man at all as she pushed and prodded at her toe where an unsightly bruise would form later and make the thing swell up, but at least she ceased her cursing and looked back up when Lir left her and got a washcloth wet when he noticed that the nail of her toe had in bashing against the stool come loose and pressed the skin around and under it in the most unpleasant way so that it tore and Molly was moving her blood around with her fingers; bubbles of blood swelling here and there and dropping _splat_ on the floor like bird droppings.

* * *

 

_Spring_ -:-   
  
The sky had turned black as pitch and the wind so cold that it left frost on his cheeks when Lir left the inside of his new castle in its construction to go out and see what all the noise about the gates was about. It wasn’t often since Haggard died that he and his people _(oh, Haggard did have people, indeed, otherwise he wouldn’t have been called a king of anything—now the title went to Lir and while he wasn’t quite certain of everything, they all seemed to trust his judgment more than they ever did that miserable old man who spent his time being wicked or staring out into the sea)_ saw such utter and complete shifts in the weather and since that morning had greeted Lir with honey soft tones and hardly a breeze enough to assist bees going from one flower to another, he was feeling urged to investigate. Like most heroes would.   
  
Still, as he approached the gate, the chains holding the drawbridge inward shaking and clacking together with that awful ringing that came when metals are so needlessly and wrath-scorn driven against things, he was surprised, delighted and somewhat afraid when the wood and metal disappeared for a moment or two in a drawn hush of the winds and someone was tossed inside, making the enchantment disperse. The woman on the ground he hadn’t seen for almost a year then and running towards her he was made aware of just where the magician was when she tried to get up from all fours on the ground _(both her feet were badly cut along the bottom, as if she had been running on flints of glass and there was bruising just along the crest of her hair and forehead; coupled with cuts jagged and deep along her hands and arms and Lir felt such a panic at that as he knew Schmendrick was not like that and would never have put those there himself)_ and called out—or tried to as the drawbridge was back in place and he probably couldn’t hear her, “Schmendrick, wait! She will kill you, you stupid--!”   
  
When Lir got to her and she looked upon him _(the crown she had expected, of course, but she didn’t say it at the time)_ with fright in her eyes for the magician they both knew and with such terror at whatever else was outside with him, he opened his mouth to ask how he might help.   
  
And then the air exploded.   
  
Even inside the protection behind the gates everyone could hear the worst sort of screaming from someone not at all human clashing with the mangled spells of a magician trying to save his life while at the same instant trying to keep everyone else safe. In such instances, the sounds of thirty angry bears and rapid, howling wolves and bones cracking on the mouth of a great ogre could scarcely have compared and been less frightening, surely.   
  
“Molly what is that out there with Schmendrick?” Lir finally spoke about the noise, helping Molly up and cringing at the blood from her feet soaking the dirt around the both of them when she held his arm and tried to stand without pressing into him as though she needed the help.   
  
She grit her teeth as the chains on the gate shook even more at the onslaught of another spell, a sense of cold green foreboding hanging with it and turning some of the wood for the gates to cold iron that hiss when a castle guard got too close to it, “A harpy. The harpy Celaeno from the Midnight Carnival has come to kill the fool.”   
  
“But why?” Lir had heard the magician in the castle when he thought he was alone, often talking about a Mommy Fortuna and beasts that weren’t real except for two, and had occasionally heard the word ‘harpy’ in the mutterings of the man before he went off to amuse Haggard for very short periods of time, but until the moment he was standing outside a battle between the two, he hadn’t really given much thought to it.   
  
Molly made to answer with a bit of exasperation in her features at how simple the answer must have been, but was cut off when another scream and another spell made the whole world, just for the people hidden in safety and just for a small moment in time, go silent and a bright, blinding blue that circled the air and the sky until just mere seconds late, absolutely no sound was heard beyond the gate and scarcely of breath was taken from Molly or Lir.   
  
After a heartbeat, Lir ordered the bridge lowered and quickly, but when he walked out into the open to see where the ancient creature and the magician were, with Molly limping after him after picking up a large brick set aside for construction, both were disheartened to find no magic being—human or harpy—anywhere in sight or with further looking about.   
  
Lir assisted Molly into the castle and asked for some clean hot water, soap and bandages from staff that weren’t quite doctors but stayed in the place in the event that Lir went to slay a dragon or something of the like and came back mauled or burnt. When they came with the items, he also sent them away, saying he would help Molly himself _(he might be king now and they might think him mad for doing such for a commoner, but Molly was probably his first friend and she was shaking; he didn’t care to let other men near her for the moment)_ and simply shut the door to the throne room so as not to be disturbed.

* * *

 

_Summer_ -:-   
  
Schmendrick never did come back from his fight with the harpy.  
  
For three months, Lir and Molly set out on horseback to look for their friend and found nothing until they made it to the exact same seashore where Lir had died and been revived and all the unicorns in the world had triumphed in their freedom as the Red Bull surrendered to the ocean waves and Amalthea’s great sacrifice of her mortality.  
  
Along the crest of land where once sat the castle of Haggard before it crumbled into the water, there were harpy feathers in a shift of three sticking to a small puddle of blood. It wasn’t enough to ensure that the wizard was dead, but it wasn’t enough to negate the belief he wasn’t coming back any time soon, either.   
  
As such, Lir offered that Molly should stay with him. He needed as much help running a kingdom as he could and her advice when he had been falling in love with Amalthea had probably been the best advice he’d ever had. Never mind that she had also been the one to give Amalthea a small taking to about a kind word here or there that lead to the unicorn in that woman body at least acknowledging the prince.   
  
Molly agreed to stay, if for no other reason than that she had nowhere else to go. Lir was glad for that, at least. (That she would stay, not that she had nowhere else to go—he wasn’t that horrible when it came to words and common sense.)   
  
He couldn’t understand why some of the castle guard gave them funny looks when they walked together about the new castle grounds or when she was always with him at council meetings, but he didn’t have to think on it for too long as Molly often noticed these looks as well and with a good insult and a yell, they would be off and back to their work, blushing at how crass and to the point she was.   
  
It helped Lir start to smile again.

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, I think I’m alone here. Lir/Molly is probably one of the few pairings here left untouched and unconsidered because he’s a prince and she’s a glorified castle housekeeper. Never mind that she listened to his bitching about Amalthea the entire time she was working the castle—so… here I am, waving pleasantly on my tiny paper boat. I’d like to think, though, that if I can survive basically alone on the good ship Schmendrick/Amalthea, I can exist on even the tiniest vessel.


End file.
